Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

  The librarian rose to her feet and glared in my direction. I mouthed the word “Sorry” and lowered my head.

  “God, no,” I wrote on my own pad. I showed Rhys, then added, “I wanted a look at the Asmore file. My father used to come here.”

  She looked at me. “Huh?”

  “He had a small collection of southern paintings, swamp scenes mostly, and liked to read about the artists. Look, I will leave now and come back later if you like.”

  She seemed to be trying to decide whether to send me off. I pointed to my chest, then the door, to show that I was prepared to leave.

  “No. Just keep quiet. They’re real funny here about talking.”

  “I promise.”

  Another nod. And a smile, or the cool, quivering fragment of one.

  The first thing I reached for was a photograph. It was one of those soft-focus portraits that cast the subject in a veil of gauze—the sort of high-handed, diaphanous treatment Hollywood used in the old days to glamorize movie stars. It was my first glimpse of Asmore, and rather than provide understanding it added to my confusion about the man. He had a thick sweep of dark hair and dark eyes that stared intensely rather than simply looked out at the world. His face possessed a feminine aspect in that it appeared carefully tended to, carefully fussed over: the eyebrows, for instance, were so perfectly straight they might’ve been plucked with tweezers, and his mouth was full and expressive, the lips perfectly formed. It was a mouth you wanted to kiss—or rather the kind someone else might want to. Boys this pretty catch hell growing up and spend much of their time brushing the dust off their jeans; bullies, finding them easy marks, take it upon themselves to teach them that not everything will come easy. From the photograph you never would’ve imagined the terrible end that awaited Asmore. You’d have thought, rather, that the future would run on forever and deliver nothing but the best: the best wife and kids, the best house in the neighborhood, the best galleries to support his career, the best collectors to pursue him, the best seat in the museum hall at the banquet honoring him for a lifetime of achievement.

  A block of ecru matting had been fitted over the photograph, and it bore a photographer’s stamp. “Whitesell,” it said. It was a name I recognized. Crossing over the stamp was the photographer’s signature with a bouquet of flourishes.

  “Levette was quite the dreamboat,” I wrote on my notepad.

  Rhys smiled and wrote, “Yes, but strongly resented emphasis on looks.”

  She slid another photograph across the table and turned the page on her pad. “Asmore with the artist Alberta Kinsey, his friend and teacher at the N. O. Art School. Like a mother to him. Called her Miss Bertie.”

  It was a small snapshot showing the young man and older woman painting together on location in the French Quarter. In the photo the artists are sitting on campstools with paint boxes open on their laps. Each has an arm extended with a brush in hand, as they appear to be painting the same view. Asmore is wearing a white shirt and white pants and dirty half boots without socks. He is painfully thin, his face gaunt with shadows around the eyes, hair tortured by a breeze. He is situated a few feet behind his mentor. The brim of a straw hat partially obscures Kinsey’s face, but she looks old enough to be his grandmother.

  There is a third figure in the photograph. It is the blurry form of a young woman standing just over Asmore’s shoulder. Is she a curious onlooker? Yet another admirer? Because her face is too distorted to make out, she would have spotted the photographer with camera raised and turned away just as the frame was being shot.

  When I finished with the picture Rhys was waiting with another notation: “Who do you imagine the girl is?”

  “Could be anyone.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t think so.”

  “Another Aunt Dottie?”

  “Lover,” she wrote, pressing the point of her pencil down hard on the pad. She leaned across the table for another look at the photograph. “Notice the old car with the La. license plate?”

  I smiled and nodded and she shook her head again. “Look!” And then I saw what she was getting at. The plate was dated 1941. “He died in September, same year. Age twenty-three!!!”

  Next she slid over a batch of newspaper clippings, including a few of his obituary published in New Orleans papers. They were yellowed and brittle and stamped with the dates when they appeared. To judge from the accounts, Asmore had been doomed from the start, with tragedy breathing down his neck every step of the way. He’d spent his childhood on a farm near the town of Melville, hard by the west bank of the Atchafalaya River in Saint Landry Parish, and today about a two hours’ drive west of New Orleans. His parents were sharecroppers who drowned in the great flood of 1927 when the levee near their home ruptured, creating a crevasse, and their bodies and belongings were swept away in twenty feet of silt and water. In the stories Levette’s survival was portrayed as a miracle: he clung to a small house floating past and climbed up on its roof, which already was carrying nests of angry water moccasins. Stranded by the rushing tide, nearly two days would pass before a sheriff’s deputy chanced upon him while out surveying the devastation. The house had traveled several miles from its original location before becoming stuck in a small tupelo swamp. Levette was still on the roof. Although the boy had avoided being bitten by the snakes, he was dehydrated and badly sunburned, and he would spend weeks recuperating. “Poor kid,” I wrote. This time when I looked up at Rhys there were tears in my eyes.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Poor kid.”

  Asmore had been an only child, and his parents’ lone surviving family member, an uncle on his father’s side, could not afford to keep him. With no other options, the boy was shipped to New Orleans and placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. Nine years old now, he was too traumatized to speak, and he became hysterical whenever it rained or the sky grew black with clouds. A teacher, recognizing how much Levette liked to color with crayons and to sketch portraits, gave him a kit containing paints and brushes and challenged him to make a picture. The result was stunning: a detailed panorama of the flood that had claimed his parents’ lives. Asmore didn’t paint the scene on the paper provided by the teacher, but rather on a canvas blind removed from one of the windows in his dormitory. A collector would pay the orphanage a hundred dollars for the picture, at the time an unheard-of sum for the work of an amateur, let alone a child.

  That same year priests from the orphanage enrolled Asmore in the children’s classes at the New Orleans Art School. He became a sensation. By the time he was thirteen he was taking advanced classes with adults at the French Quarter establishment and winning drawing and painting competitions. One of Asmore’s most influential teachers was Paul Ninas, a modernist who would become famous for the murals he painted in 1938 in the Sazerac Bar of the Roosevelt Hotel, today known as the Fairmont. According to the clippings, Asmore assisted Ninas on the Sazerac project. The two artists completed the work at Ninas’s studio in the Pontalba Buildings at Jackson Square, and they installed the four large panels during the bar’s off-hours, beginning at two o’clock in the morning and working until noon.

  “I know those paintings,” I wrote on the pad. “Former hangout, back when I wrote for the paper. Gorgeous.”

  “Of course you’d know them!”

  “Barfly that I am, you mean?”

  She made her head bob up and down in an exaggerated nod.

  “Beautiful in the candlelight,” I wrote.

  “Yes. Beautiful any time.”

  Early in his studies Asmore was regarded as a child savant. Later on, though still a teenager, he had matured to a point where he had no peer either among his classmates or instructors. Ninas, who often complained about having to teach to make a living, said he would gladly give classes for free “if they all came like the amazing Levette.” Alberta Kinsey referred to her young pupil as “our exciting master.” One newspaper story, titled “Local Prodigy Wins Scholarship,” quoted Kinsey as saying, “In describing Levette I hesi
tate to use the word genius—that is quite a large statement—but he is like no one else. He is unique, he is special, he awes us to no end.”

  In another story a school administrator said, “We have in our midst the greatest talent of our time and his name is Levette Asmore.”

  Despite the long roster of testimonials, when Asmore was twenty-one the Arts and Crafts Club held a solo exhibition of his paintings at its Royal Street gallery and succeeded in selling only seven of the thirty works offered for sale. The poor result was attributed to a newspaper review that ran on the morning of the opening. Its critic wrote, “Thirty years ago Mr. Asmore’s carnality might have appealed to the depraved clients of Tommy Anderson and Lulu White, Storyville flesh peddlers, but in today’s more sophisticated climate the art patron deserves a respite from such obscenity. His emphasis on the Negro figure strains the viewer’s patience while simultaneously assaulting him with an exaggerated use of color. Even Mr. Asmore’s still life of magnolias looks like a woman in the throes of childbirth, and a colored one at that. I would warn any and all mothers of impressionable young girls to lock them inside. Gentlemen, protect your wives. Levette Asmore has arrived.”

  “Can you believe this crap?” I wrote.

  “Don’t want to,” Rhys replied.

  It would be the only sales exhibition of Asmore’s career. At the time of his death two years later he was sharing a tumbledown Creole cottage with a friend in a tough, racially mixed block of the French Quarter. Unlike today, when an address in the city’s oldest neighborhood is widely coveted and considered chic, to live in the Vieux Carré then was often a proposition of last resorts, and usually meant you could not afford better accommodations in an Uptown neighborhood. A midcentury photographer named Clarence John Laughlin had published a picture of Asmore’s last residence in a large limited-edition book called New Orleans and Its Living Past. The photo appeared as plate 24 with this caption, written by the book’s author, David L. Cohn: “An eighteenth-century house in Saint Philip Street. It is of the earliest type of construction, brick between posts. Note the fine dormer window.

  “It is said in the neighborhood that this house is haunted. Certainly it presents a sinister aspect.”

  A copy of the Laughlin photo, reproduced on a sheet of crumpled Xerox paper, was clipped to a story about Asmore’s funeral, which ran to a length of a thousand words. A mortuary, the House of Bultman, had handled the well-attended service for the “infamous young firebrand,” as the artist was described. A portrait of Asmore, lovingly painted by Alberta Kinsey, stood next to an empty and closed coffin adorned with a single magnolia blossom, the flower the artist most liked to paint. “I feel as though I shall never laugh again,” said one young woman as she wept.

  “But why exactly did he do it?” I wrote. “Booze? Women? That bad review? WHAT MADE HIM JUMP?”

  Rhys slid another clipping across the table, dated September 1941, less than two weeks before Asmore’s death. The byline belonged to the same newspaper critic who’d so mercilessly ridiculed Asmore’s gallery showing two years before. CONTROVERSIAL ARTIST TO UNVEIL PUBLICLY FINANCED MURAL, read the headline.

  For days now, visitors to the Magazine Street post office have noticed a dark, ruggedly handsome young man in their midst. He wears the stained overalls of a house painter but in fact he is a creative artist, one Levette Asmore, 23, a product of Warren Easton High School and currently a student at the Arts and Crafts Club, 712 Royal Street.

  Asmore studied with Paul Ninas, Enrique Alferez and Alberta Kinsey, among others, and in recent years he made a memorable debut when his erotic paintings, predominantly of Negroes, were featured in a one-man exhibition that this writer had the opportunity to review.

  Asmore has installed a mural in the station that he completed at his French Quarter studio. The work measures eight feet tall and twenty feet wide, and it now hangs on a large expanse of wall in the lobby. Scaffolding cloaked in tarpaulin reaches to the ceiling, blocking the view for visitors curious for a look.

  The subject of this creation presumably is the history of transportation in America, according to both WPA officials and agents with the U.S. Treasury Department’s procurement division, which gave Asmore the commission. The official unveiling next week normally would be an event of great civic pride for area citizens, but it is this writer’s unpleasant duty to report that there is nothing normal about Asmore’s mural.

  Trains, planes and automobiles, ostensibly the painting’s subject, have been substituted with the young man’s perverted preoccupation with our baser selves. Once again the American Negro is featured in the Asmore composition, and in poses even more scandalous than those presented in the artist’s inflammatory easel paintings. Is perverting the nation’s youth the goal of the New Deal artist? Is miscegenation another aim? The answers are yes, if one is to judge from the raucous Asmore production.

  Reached at his home last night, New Orleans district manager Charles F. Dodge reacted strongly to the report that Asmore had elected to explore subject matter other than the one to which he had been assigned. “Immediate steps will be taken to remedy this unfortunate situation,” vowed Dodge, who added, “I am saddened and chagrined.”

  Angela Gregory, consultant for the WPA art project in Louisiana, also voiced an objection. “Mr. Asmore submitted sketches showing the history of transportation in America,” she said. “Subsequent visits to his studio revealed that indeed he was developing the project. He followed procedure. In one private conversation he allowed as to how he hoped to show space travel as a future possibility, perhaps in the form of a rocket ship. I thought he was under the spell of Jules Verne and requested he dismiss with fantasy and stick to reality. That he has chosen the subject you describe is a mockery not only to the government agency that so generously supported him but to the American people whose moral integrity is under attack and whose tax dollars are being squandered.”

  Dodge has ordered the station closed until the matter can be investigated.

  Asmore refused to comment when approached last night as he was walking home from a Frenchtown jazz club. He became agitated when questioned about the mural’s content. “I am an artist,” he said before racing off. “I have no interest in the history of transportation in this or any other country.”

  I had barely finished reading the article when Rhys slid another clipping in front of me. The story appeared under the heading “News in Brief.”

  Federal and city officials convened yesterday at a post office on Magazine Street and determined that a mural by controversial artist Levette Asmore was obscene and ordered the painting destroyed.

  A large crowd, estimated at several hundred, gathered at the station, demanding to be allowed entrance. “We want to see how our hard-earned tax dollars are being spent,” said David Parker, a service station attendant from Biloxi. “It isn’t right they won’t let us see it. I drove three hours in traffic to get here. Plus, I need stamps. This is an outrage.”

  Asmore provoked negative criticism earlier in his career when his inaugural sales exhibition proved to be “pornography disguised as fine art,” as a reviewer for this newspaper reported. The mural reputedly depicted Negroes.

  A WPA official called police to the scene when a supporter of the project became unruly. Order was restored when the artist himself volunteered to whitewash the twenty-foot-long painting. Asmore has been ordered to return the government funds he received for the work. He refused comment when contacted later at his home in the French Quarter.

  “What do you think was in those paintings?” I wrote.

  She hitched up her shoulders. “Not sure what you mean.”

  “The subject matter, the scene he painted. Miscegenation means breeding between races—whites and nonwhites.”

  “Ahead of his time, no doubt. Way ahead. Even for THIS time.”

  I stared at her and shook my head.

  “To some people,” she added in a fast scribble.

  “Are there any pictures of the
mural? Any sketches? Anything to show what it looked like?”

  “None.”

  I nodded, then wrote, “They made him whitewash his own painting. How terrible.”

  Rhys shrugged her shoulders again.

  “Too bad it was destroyed.”

  She waited a long time before writing, “If whitewashed, not necessarily destroyed at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She didn’t answer and I wrote again, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

  From the notepads she removed the pages with our scribbling and tucked them in a sweater pocket. I helped her gather up the Asmore material and place it back in the file. “Let’s take a drive up Magazine Street,” she said, speaking out loud at last.

  THREE

  The building stood about fifty feet from Magazine Street, its wooden façade scabbed with flaking paint, the lawn in front a patch of smooth brown earth bisected by a narrow cement walkway. Plastered on the windows were broadsheets showing women either having their nails done or sporting elaborate hairdos. An electric sign standing out by the curb, and burning even in daytime, said HAIR NAILS SKIN. Another over the entrance said WHEELER BEAUTY ACADEMY.

  I checked the address again to make sure we’d come to the right place. The post office, apparently, was no more, replaced with a school for aspiring hairdressers and cosmetologists. It was a dumpy, neglected building in an Uptown district crowded with dumpy, neglected buildings. To imagine the young Asmore bounding up the stairs and pushing past the wide double doors, on his way to install a masterpiece, required more creative steam than I was able to muster at the moment. “Nothing beautiful about this beauty school,” I said and issued a low whistle.

  I drive a nice car, a late-model Audi sedan with a leather interior and power everything. But it was so nice as to draw attention, so earlier, when Rhys and I left the French Quarter, it was in her van: the ancient, rust-ruined one with an expired brake tag and magnetic signs on the doors advertising the Guild. We were sitting in the van now, parked on the street that ran alongside the school. “Can I trust you with something, Jack?” she said. “You think I can do that?”